‘The George Washington of …’

Americans have a bad habit of viewing foreign revolutions in the context of the one that took place here during the 1770s and ’80s. We tend to forget how courageous, brilliant, moral and forward-thinking were the men who led this enterprise. So, back in the 1960s, many of us imagined that Ho Chi Minh, a small-time Third World communist dictator propped up by various America-hating regimes, was “The George Washington of Vietnam.”

We often forget that revolutions, even those that occurred in heretofore civilized countries in Washington’s own time, didn’t always turn out well. Not long after America’s war for independence from Britain, the French overthrew their monarchy. The results included a paroxysm of internal bloodletting, followed by the emergence of a military dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, who plunged much of the Western world into war.

Americans are entertaining many of the same fantasies about the Egyptian protests that they embraced in previous revolutionary movements, as noted in yesterday’s post, “Short memories.”

For those inclined to disabuse themselves of these notions, here’s Byron York on the attitudes motivating many Egyptians.